I do hope the Republican party listens to Matt Barber and his ilk. Perhaps we never have to see a Republican president, or GOP majority in Congress, or conservative appointee to the courts, again in our lifetime.
Today we find an improvident Republican Party lost in the political wilderness. As the GOP seeks to find its own Promised Land – a return to majority leadership – it has, to its own detriment, rebelled against the core conservative principles solemnized within its own party platform....Yes, the Republicans lost the White House because George Bush was too liberal. And they lost the Congress because Tom Delay and John Boehner hugged a few too many trees.
Liberal Democrats and “moderate” Republicans alike continue to misrepresent voters’ ballot box rejection of today’s “centrist” GOP as an overall aversion to larger conservatism. Frankly, it’s tiresome and a bit embarrassing. In fact, precisely the opposite is true.
At some point, the GOP needs to cut out the cancer in its midst (that'd be you, Matt). The party has spent years building and coddling a ridiculously conservative base, all the while watching its moderate wing wither away on the vine. The result has been a conservative's dream of government - huge tax cuts, numerous wars, massive defense spending, and endless attacks on abortion and gays. And what did it get us? Huge deficits, two quagmires, and a sense by anyone who knows a woman or a gay person that the Republicans are intolerant, angry, and mean.
The ultimate irony of Matt Barber's argument, that the GOP has lost because it went too liberal, is that McCain lost the election, in part, because he went too conservative (though Barber argues, of course, that McCain went too far to the left, and that's why he lost - uh huh). Picking Palin as a running mate was an insane gamble to the right, and McCain checked the moderate nice guy image that he'd been culling for years, and replaced it with an angry old intolerant conservative (remember how McCain suddenly wanted Roe overturned?). And he lost.
You can't hold the presidency for 8 years, and the congress for 12, and claim that if only given a chance you could prove to the American people that your ideology works. The Matt Barbers of the world have been running the Republican party, and our country, for at least that long. And what has it gotten the party? What has it gotten America?
